


Pattern Recognition

by Anonymous



Series: Is this thing (an)on? [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, M/M, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-09-26 13:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17142728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: They both know Peter’s unplanned, unannounced visit isn’t so much of a social call as it is a SHIELD directive.Gotta keep an eye on Tony. He quit the team and fucked off to nowhere, Alaska. We’re worried about him.Tony snorts, trying to imagine how that conversation went down. If Peter had accepted it with the same solemn gravity he did when he listened to other mission briefings; if Fury had even bothered to pretend this was official, legitimate Avengers business.Set post-Infinity War. Peter shows up uninvited, asking questions Tony doesn’t want to answer.





	1. Pareidolia

“We could just blow it up.”

It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but it’ll get the job done. Tony tries to pretend he isn’t a little bit giddy at the thought. He mostly fails. The stump is massive and gnarled, and by the time the ground has thawed enough to pull it out with a tractor it’ll be too late in the season for Ben to clear and plant the field.

The rancher looks him over with a critical eye. “Long as you don’t blow yourself up doing it.”

“Nah, I used to do this sort of thing all the time. Haven’t blown myself up yet.”

“If you say so. Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Tony gets to work. His head is killing him, but being outside in the fresh air and the cold is helping a bit.

The stump is stubbornly half frozen into the ground, and it takes a little more juice than he initially would have guessed, but by the time he’s done the majority of it is in pieces scattered across the landscape. Ben should be able to haul the remaining pieces out easy enough with the excavator, now that the ground is loosened up. Tony wipes the dirt from his hands, climbs back into his truck and heads down the road, back towards Ben’s house.

He finds Ben out by the cattle pens, talking to Millie.

“Glad to see you’re still in one piece,” Millie says with a grin when she sees Tony pull up. “Could feel my teeth rattle after that last one.”

“I’m surprisingly hard to kill, turns out.”

Ben gives him a handshake and a couple of neatly wrapped steaks for his trouble. Tony figures he’ll grill one of them up tonight for himself and his uninvited houseguest, and throw the others in the freezer. Spring might be just around the corner, but it’s never too early to start stocking up for next winter.

The drive back to the cabin is rough, partially because the road is torn up from the combined freeze and thaw of winter and early spring, but mostly because his truck isn't happy. He probably shouldn't have taken her out without a little TLC first, not after being garaged all winter. Thankfully it's not that far - he'll give her a good once over as soon as he gets back to the cabin.

When he opens the door he finds Peter already awake, all bleary eyed and sleep-mussed hair, making himself coffee in the french press like he belongs there.

“What the heck was that noise? Felt like something exploded,” he asks.

Ah. Ben’s place was a good way down the road, but clearly Peter’s super-senses were keen enough to pick up on the racket.

“Helping a friend blow some stuff up.”

Peter looks at him for a beat, probably trying to figure out if Tony is serious or if - if what, exactly? Did the kid think he was unstable enough to just set off a bunch of explosives for no reason?

He very well might, Tony realizes with a jolt.

They both know Peter’s unplanned, unannounced visit isn’t so much of a social call as it is a SHIELD directive. _Gotta keep an eye on Tony. He quit the team and fucked off to nowhere, Alaska. We’re worried about him_.

Tony snorts, trying to imagine how that conversation went down. If Peter had accepted it with the same solemn gravity he did when he listened to other mission briefings; if Fury had even bothered to pretend this was official, legitimate Avengers business.

Peter turns away, pressing down the plunger on the french press. When he’s done, he wraps both hands around the steaming mug of coffee, closing his eyes and leaning against the counter as he takes a sip.

It’s been a long time since Tony’s seen Peter. He actually can’t remember how long, now. The kid has finally grown into his frame - still lithe, but with strong shoulders and trim hips that Tony tells himself he doesn’t notice. Or if he does, it’s just that it’s weird to look at him and realize that Peter isn’t a teenager anymore.

“So, what were you blowing up?” Peter asks, without opening his eyes.

“Oh, the usual. Alien spaceship.”

Peter’s eyes shoot open. Whoops, okay. Cracking jokes possibly not the best approach here.

“Kidding, obviously. Guy down the road is trying to clear a patch of land, I was helping him get rid of a big old stump that was in the way.” Tony pauses. “Make sure you put that in your report. I’m making friends and helping neighbors, so Fury can stop with the mental health checks.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Uh huh.”

“It’s not. You can believe whatever you want, but this has nothing to do with Fury.”

“Right.”

Tony can see Peter’s jaw clenching, and thinks he should probably lay off. It’s not that he doesn’t want Peter here, exactly. It’s just... hard.

He’d come out here to get away. Away from the team, from SHIELD, from the mess of the Accords. Away from black holes and wizards and spaceships landing in the middle of 6th Avenue.

Peter brings all of that baggage right along with him, whether he means to or not.

It's not his fault, not like he's doing it on purpose, but it doesn’t change the fact that Peter is tied so closely into the world Tony had left behind. That he can't face one without remembering the other.

 

*

 

They spend the rest of the day tinkering around in Tony’s garage, giving the truck some much-needed TLC, mostly in silence. It’s easy, and almost comfortable, if not for the way Tony catches Peter looking at him sometimes. It’s something more than just concern, but Tony judiciously avoids thinking about what else it could be.

Peter is still visibly jetlagged from the flight, not to mention the daylight hours are limited, so they turn in early that night.

Tony grills up the steaks from Ben with some potatoes from the root cellar, served up with tall glasses of Tony’s own homebrewed beer. Peter tips his head back and empties his glass in just a few long swallows. 

It keeps throwing Tony for a loop; everything from Peter’s newly-broadened shoulders to the easy confidence in his grin when he sets his glass down. He’s not that stumbling, stuttering fifteen-year old kid anymore. Somewhere along the way he’d gone to college, turned twenty-one, had his first drink - not necessarily in that order. Found his own two feet, standing on his own somewhere outside of Tony’s shadow.

Tony must have blinked and missed it, like so many other milestones. Milestones Peter almost died too young to experience. _Had_ died too young to experience, in fact. Tony’s hand clenches, tucked away under the table. He’s made it a point not to think about those days.

Peter, of course, is too observant by half.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Peachy. How about you?”

Peter isn’t buying it. “You know, you don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

“Seriously, did Fury put you up to this? Or was it Hill?”

“No one sent me here, Tony.” Peter pauses, looking him over, assessing. “I’m here because I wanted - because I needed to talk to you.”

“About?”

“You know what about.”

Tony does know.  It’s a conversation he’s avoided ever since they made it back from Titan. In the immediate aftermath, Peter had been dazed and overwhelmed, and still too young and awestruck by his childhood hero to force the conversation.

And then... then Tony had left.

And at some point, Peter had grown up. Grown past the hero worship, which is both a blow to Tony’s ego and also a relief, to have that undeserved pedestal toppled beneath him. Both of them on (nearly) equal footing now, in more than one sense. But the thing with pedestals is that they provide distance. You don’t have to stand eye to eye with someone, close enough see your own failures reflected back in their eyes.

Tony shifts in his chair, unnerved.

“Sorry, was there something about me cutting off all contact and moving to the middle of nowhere that wasn’t clear?” he says.

“Does that make it easier for you?” Peter’s brow is pinched, one corner of mouth pulled down.  “Telling yourself that it was your choice to cut off contact?”

Tony frowns back at him, his chair scraping along the floor as he stands.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

 

*

 

The cabin had previously belonged to an older couple, Tony didn't know the full story - he knew the wife had passed away unexpectedly, that her husband had moved back to Anchorage to spend more time with the grandkids. Or something like that, anyway.

It was small, not much more than a living space with a kitchen along one wall, a woodstove in the opposite corner, and a bedroom loft up above.  As long as he kept the wood stove burning the whole place stayed comfortably warm, maybe a little frost on the windows first thing in the morning, but even that was a refreshing kind of cold.

Even as worn out as he'd been when he'd first arrived, it had still taken weeks to get used to sleeping here.

Some of that was down to the difference in the daylight hours - he’d come out here in the summer, when even at night the darkest it got was a kind of half-twilight. But the longer he stayed, the more he realized the harder adjustment was down to the general pace of life.

There was no team training here, no interminable conference calls with Ross, no urgent threats to suit up and handle at any given moment. For what felt like weeks he’d paced like a caged animal, body primed for a rush of adrenaline that never came - or worse, came uncalled for in the middle of the night, startling him awake from fever-vivid nightmares.

That feeling still hasn’t completely gone away, but the nightmares have become less frequent, at least.

He's not sure if it's some delayed reaction to the explosions from earlier, planned though they were, or Peter's unexpected visit stirring up unwanted memories, but tonight he startles awake with the taste of blood and dust clinging to his throat, heart hammering.

On any other night he would get up, stoke the fire, and find some project to occupy his mind until dawn.

Except.

Peter is there, stretched out asleep on the couch in the main room below.

Tony sits up in bed - from here he can just see a mess of brown curls falling over one arm of the couch. Whatever. It’s not like he asked the kid to visit, he’s not going to stay sequestered awake in his bed for hours in his own damn home. Peter can think whatever he wants of his sleep habits.

It’s still dark outside, but not as dark as Tony would expect. Winter must have decided it wasn’t done with them yet - the cabin is just on the edge of not warm enough and there’s a fresh blanket of snow covering the barely-thawed ground outside. The weak pre-dawn light catches on every gentle curve of snow, and damn, there’s a lot of it out there, he realizes.

He twitches the curtain on the kitchen window back into place and fills up a pot of water to heat on the stove for coffee, then crouches down to stoke the fire. He doesn’t realize Peter is awake until he hears a muffled voice behind him.

“‘S cold.”

“It’s Alaska, what did you expect?”

“A better heating system,” Peter mumbles back. Brat.

“It’s a fire. Calling it a ‘heating system’ is overstating things by about a mile.”

Peter’s head pops up out of the blankets. “So make it better. You’re Tony Stark, if anyone can invent something better, it’s you.”

The stove door is still open, ember-red coals painting Peter’s expression in an odd light - not sleepy, or vaguely annoyed like he should be, but there’s a flash of something almost desperate there. Then Peter sighs, turns away, leaning back against the arm of the couch.

The moment passes.

Tony turns back to the stove and finishes with the fire. And okay yeah, he'll admit the wood stove that had come with the place was ancient. He could upgrade to a secondary burn model - more heat for less wood, or hell, he’s probably got enough metal scraps and firebricks lying around to throw together a rocket mass heater, if he wanted. Packing cob is a far cry from 3D printing titanium gold alloy suits in his private lab, but then again, his lab is a long ways away these days.

“It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?” Peter says quietly, interrupting his thoughts. He’s looking out the front window, the view framed by snow-tipped trees.  “Even though it’s dangerous. Most people don’t get to see the world like this.”

It’s true. Tony had never really been a nature kind of guy. He enjoyed a good view, but mostly what that meant was appreciating it through double-paned floor to ceiling windows while nursing a glass of scotch served at the perfect temperature, thanks to modern conveniences like electricity and on-demand refrigeration.

“Yeah, it’s not a bad view, is it?”

“No, not at all.” Peter sounds almost sad.  

Tony looks away, down at his hands.

There’s still engine grease or dirt or something stuck under his fingernails. Seems like there always is. The grime works its way into the creases of his knuckles, around the edges of his nail beds. Mechanic's hands. He rubs them together, as much to warm them up as to keep himself from getting stuck in place, staring down at them the way he sometimes catches himself doing. Doesn't want Peter to witness that particular little display of instability.

Peter curls deeper into the couch, wrapping the blanket tighter around himself until all that's visible is a tangle of hair and his eyes, still focused on the fire as if he can make it burn hotter by sheer will alone.

Tony rolls his eyes at the sight.

"Okay, fine. Go sleep upstairs if you’re that cold."

Peter stands without bothering to untangle himself from the blanket, making his way up the stairs to the loft wrapped up like a walking blanket-burrito. Tony can't help the grin that cracks his face at the sight.

He waits until the water on the stove is just on the edge of boiling before pulling it off and pouring it over the coffee grounds in the french press. Once it's ready, he pours out a mug for himself and a second for Peter, carefully carrying them both up the stairs. Peter is snoring softly on the far side of the bed, tucked under both his own blankets as well as Tony's.

Tony sets both coffee mugs on the nightstand, then settles down on the near side of the bed, back propped up by pillows against the headboard.

The coffee doesn't quite manage to keep him awake. Something about Peter sleeping warm beside him lulls him back under.

 

*

 

He’s been here before. Not here exactly - there’s always small differences, variations on a theme. What’s that saying, you never step into the same river twice? Something like that, anyway.

Today’s variation is surprisingly empty. There are no bodies. No outstretched hands reaching towards him, begging for help, pulling him close with choked accusations. The only hands left are his own, caked with blood and ash.

He starts to wipe them off, stops himself. Remembers.

He’d known this was a one-way trip the second he’d boarded the ship. To be honest, he’d known even before that, although he’s not sure exactly when he’d come to accept it as fact. As soon as the ship had appeared over 6th Avenue? As soon as Banner had said the name?

Not that it matters now. The name, or any of the rest of it.

It’d been a one way trip right up until Peter had dropped down from the ceiling and Tony’d had to start reworking everything on the fly. It wasn't enough just to stop Thanos. They had to win, because that was the only way they got to go home.

Except they hadn't won, had they?

The blue woman is watching him, calculating. When he meets her eyes, she gestures at the wound in his side. "Are you going to die?"

"Maybe. I don't know," he replies, honestly.

The wound had been hastily patched - the nanoparticles can staunch the bleeding, but that's about it. They'd been designed primarily for protection, not first aid, which he sorely regrets now. Stupid, not to plan for that eventuality.

He supposes even if he had designed them to heal, he would've only been able to test them on minor injuries. Tony is well aware that his judgement is sometimes iffy when it comes to testing out new tech, but he's fairly certain he wouldn't have actually stabbed himself through the gut just to run some beta tests on nanotech-assisted healing.

"Can you stand?" the blue woman asks.

"Let's find out."

Tony levers himself to his feet - slowly, cautiously. "I'm Tony, by the way."

"Nebula."

He starts to offer his hand, out of pure habit. It's filthy. He lets it drop back to his side. Nebula just nods back at him. It occurs to him belatedly that handshakes may not be a thing people do out here.

Nebula's ship had been trashed during the fight, but the other ship is larger and in much better shape. There are a few sizable dents in the fuselage and some rubble scattered around, which Nebula pries off of the ship as Tony watches, mouth hanging open. It shouldn't still shock him, not after ten years, not after watching people like Cap and Peter routinely do the impossible -

Nope. Not thinking about that yet.

He has no way of knowing if any of the team is still alive. He could very well be the last one standing. Barely standing, at that.

They scavenge parts from the other two wrecked ships to repair the third. The plan is to head to Earth - Tony because he has to, because it’s home. Nebula, because it's the last place Thanos must have gone and she's still somehow set on having her revenge, hopeless as it is.

She sets to work with single-minded purpose that Tony envies now. Normally he would be able to do the same, focus on the work: one problem to solve, then the next, and the next. Instead, he catches himself staring blankly in front of him, thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

They test the life support first, mostly because they can test it on the ground. The flight controls are a little jittery, the left forward engine seems to have taken some damage. Nebula doesn't seem overly concerned about it.

"I’ve seen this ship stay airborne in far worse shape than this."

If that was meant to be reassuring, the effort falls flat. Still, it’s the only ship they’ve got - it’s either this, or nothing.

The jump drive diagnostics come back clear, which is good, because they won't really have a way to test it before they head out. Tony figures if something does go wrong, being demolecularized across space probably isn't a bad way to go. There's a quote like that too, something about being made of stardust...

But he's not thinking about it.

He's not thinking about anything at all.

After that, it's just a matter of pilfering supplies for the trip. They grab food, tools, spare parts from the other ships. Nebula gathers up the weapons she finds.  If crashing into Thanos with a fucking spaceship barely made a dent, Tony's not sure what an extra couple of plasma guns are gonna do. He keeps his mouth shut though.

Tony watches, standing on the ship's ramp with one hand curled protectively over his side.

Some part of him can't bear to turn around, to leave. It feels like abandoning Peter - leaving him behind, scared and alone and entirely too young to be _gone_ , just like that. He wonders if it would feel any different if he had a body to bring back. To deliver the kid back to his Aunt with an apology that he knows won't be anywhere near enough.

Nebula dumps the remainder of her pilfered arsenal in the cargo hold.

"Let's go," she says, already reaching up to close the ramp.

She doesn't look back.

 

*

 

Tony wakes up unexpectedly warm.

He’s gotten used to the brisk morning air out here, almost grateful for it; the way the cold pushes him awake, rather than allowing his muddled dreams to linger over him like a fog. It takes a while to put the pieces together. He remembers waking up earlier, sees brief flashes of the preceding nightmare. Remembers Peter curled up on the couch downstairs, bitching about the cold.

Tony closes his eyes.

He can remember what the stars looked like from the surface of Titan, how the planet itself had given off a sickly, forlorn air. How Peter had clung to him in those last, desperate moments. How Tony had struggled for breath, afterward, staring at his own empty hands.

Peter is beside him now, his features outlined in the cool glow of Tony’s chestpiece. He keeps meaning to take the thing off, hide it somewhere out of the way, somewhere safe. For whatever reason, he’s never quite managed. At odd moments he catches himself flat-footed, surprised yet again by its continued presence.

He’s grateful for it now though, for the soft blue light it emits. All of his memories from Titan are bathed in red.

He finds himself staring at Peter, still asleep, unconcerned. It’s a world away from the scared kid Peter is in his nightmares, begging Tony to make it stop. As if he could. He’s so lost in the memory he somehow misses Peter waking up.

“You’re still wearing it,” Peter says, eyes focused on the reactor, a small smile on his face.

“Apparently.”

Peter shifts, pulls one hand out from under the covers, reaching out. “Can I?”

Tony swallows. Peter is hyper-focused, his expression caught somewhere between wonder and calculation. Tony’s not quite sure what this is, whether he should be encouraging this fascination or not.

But he’s not particularly good at denying Peter anything; hasn’t been for years now. It’s part of the reason he’d left.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Peter reaches out, tracing the reactor with his fingertips.

“Fury told me you don’t need it anymore, for the shrapnel.”

“Nope.” Tony taps the chestpiece, careful not to brush Peter’s hand as he does it. “Had surgery a few years back, in an actual hospital with anesthesia this time, instead of a cave in the desert. Got all the little scraps out.”

“You kept the first one too, even after it ran out of power.”

Tony freezes. “Who told you that?”

“You did,” Peter replies, as if the answer should be obvious.

He doesn’t remember, but takes Peter at his word. He knows from experience that Peter is a pretty terrible liar. It’s strange to find himself talking to Peter about it though. Tony may have hung onto it, but he hasn’t actually thought much about that first reactor in years. He sits up in bed, pulling away from Peter’s hand.

Peter ducks his head, looks away. “Sorry.”

“It’s no big deal,” Tony says. “I don’t know why I’m still wearing it, to be honest. Not a lot of world-ending threats out here.”

“That’s not why you made it though - the first one, I mean.”

“No, I made it to save my own ass. You’d be amazed how at just how motivating my self-preservation instincts can be.”

Peter doesn't reply, just _hmms_ sleepily, already burrowing himself back under the covers. Tony wishes he could follow him back to sleep, but he's wide awake now, mind racing with thoughts of the reactor. He really should take it off - it's not even acting as a housing unit for nanoparticles anymore, it's just a power source with nothing left to power.

Pepper had hated the thing - not because of what it was but because of what it had meant, for the both of them. That Tony might never stop being Iron Man, that maybe he _couldn't_. And by the time Tony was finally ready to step off that never-ending ride, Pepper had already moved on, tired of waiting for him.

He still wore the chestpiece, because now it was the only thing left; the only reminder of home he'd bothered to take with him.

 

*

 

Peter's cheeks are flushed pink and he's grinning like a kid at Christmas. Tony rolls his eyes at the sight. No one should look this happy shoveling through a foot of snow.

Of course, for Peter this is probably child's play - he's flushed out of pure giddiness, not exertion. Within minutes, he's cleared a path from the front door to the workshop, and then another one that tracks from the cabin to the woodshed. Tony grudgingly admits he might be glad the kid decided to visit. The cold has a bad habit of making old wounds ache all the worse. It would've been hell to do on his own, not that he hasn't done it countless times before.

"Do you have hot chocolate?" Peter asks breathlessly, as soon as he's finished.

Tony mentally takes back everything he may have thought yesterday about Peter having grown up.

"I have chocolate and canned milk. We can make do."

Instead of looking disgusted, which clearly he should, Peter looks elated at the news. They head back inside, kicking the snow off their boots and hanging up their coats and gloves near the stove to dry out.

Tony sets a pot of milk on the stove to heat, breaking up chunks of chocolate in his hands before adding them to the pot to melt, one at a time. Tony has a flash of memory of Peter at sixteen, drinking some ridiculously overpriced single-origin fair trade whipped-cream-topped monstrosity Tony had bought him. They'd been celebrating some milestone or another, Tony forgets what. Might have been a new web fluid formula, or wait, maybe when the kid had finally gotten his junior license? Something like that, anyway.

In any case, Peter reacts now the same way he did then, holding his mug right in front of his face and inhaling the scent of warm chocolate and cinnamon, then tipping his head back and closing his eyes in pleasure.

"Mmmm."

Tony sticks the pot back on the stove to keep it warm. There's still some left in case Peter wants more later.

Peter frowns. "You should have some too. It's good!"

"Nah. I grew out of the hot chocolate thing about the same time I grew out of needing a nanny."

"It's not about being a kid or whatever. Your body burns more calories in the cold."

"Wow, really? Thanks for the fourth grade science lesson."

"I don't think that's something they normally cover in fourth grade."

"It isn't?" He wouldn't know.

Peter drops the subject.

Tony drinks the hot chocolate. Partially because he doesn't want to keep arguing with the kid about it, but mostly because his fingers are still a bit numb and clumsy from being outside. He warms them against the mug, wincing at the pins as needles as the nerves come back online. The kid is right - it's actually not bad, although it's still a pretty far cry from the menu offerings at MarieBelle.

Of course, the drink only keeps Peter occupied for so long.

"What do you normally do on days like this?"

"Sit back and enjoy the peace and quiet," Tony answers, pointedly.

Peter doesn't seem deterred by his sniping in the least.

"So what, you just sit around?"

"Pretty much."

"That doesn't sound like you."

"Yeah, well. There's not much to do out here. That's kind of the whole point."

Peter's mouth twists. "There's plenty to do. You could build stuff. I mean, you built Iron Man in a _cave_ , out here you've got a whole workshop full of tools."

"Like what, another suit? Another weapon?" Tony should stop. It's not the kid's fault he's hit a nerve. "Another AI, another monumental breakthrough in clean energy? You all act like innovation is a endlessly renewable resource, and maybe on a global, universal scale it is. But you ever consider maybe I'm done? I'm tapped out. Finito. Last golden egg and all that jazz."

"You're lying."

"How would _you_ know?"

 

*

 

The launch is rough.

The left forward engine keeps cutting out and catching again, causing them to accelerate in fits and starts, swinging wildly to one side then straightening out, twisting drunkenly upwards. Tony breathes through it, his seat harness digging into his shoulders and sides, hands clenched tight on either side of him. Nebula is piloting, which Tony is grateful for - she seems to be unaffected by the dizzying changes in velocity and orientation.

The access point swings into view.

The left engine sputters and dies.

" _Are we gonna make it?_ " Tony yells over the screaming strain of the remaining engine.

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Probably not."

She seems slightly irritated by the admission, as if the possibility of crash landing back on Titan is more of a personal insult rather than a messy death. Tony is caught between finding it terrifying and oddly reassuring. It reminds him of Natasha, just a bit - the way she can get almost inhumanly blase when the shit hits the fan. Tony knows it's an instinct borne out of years of training that he doesn't have.

He wonders if Natasha's mask is cracking now, in the face of their combined failure. He wonders if she's even alive.

If Natasha's anything though, she's a survivor, although Tony knows all too well that personal attributes had no place in the odds here.

If they did, Peter would be here right now, sitting in Tony's place.

They make it to the access point. Tony isn't sure what happens next, but he knows that much. Something screeches in protest behind them.

"Is it supposed to make that noise?"

Nebula doesn't answer him though. She's too busy handling the controls, one display screen after another flashing around her head in writing Tony doesn't understand. He doesn't entirely need to, though - everything is flashing red, it can’t be good.

The ship is juttering, violently enough that Tony doesn't think he could get to his feet if he tried. Nebula twists in her own seat to look behind them, sneering at what she sees. Tony tries to crane his neck around too, but all he gets is a brief glimpse before he's jolted around to the other side, one arm braced against his midsection.

When he looks up again, Nebula is in the process of detaching her arm. The hand continues to move on its own, grabbing onto the controls to pilot the ship as Nebula secures the shoulder joint to the arm of the chair.

" _What the fu -_ " Tony is pretty sure he's yelling, but there's too much noise to even hear his own voice.

Nebula unbuckles her seat harness, taps something on her chest and a shimmering blue shield spreads out over her. She slaps a few buttons on Tony's console and a headset assembles around him.

"I have to cut the left engine loose, it's making our flight path too unstable," she says in a rush.

"I can go instead," Tony offers, but she's already shaking her head. It makes sense to him - Nebula can stay at the helm, Tony can assemble what's left of his suit and head to the back. Besides, he's not sure how efficiently she can work with one arm otherwise occupied.

"No. You don't know the systems well enough to know which parts to sacrifice and which to keep."

And with that, she's gone.

 

*

 

"So what is this - spring break? Instead of heading to the Bahamas with a bunch of co-eds you decided the backwoods of Alaska would be a better party scene?"

Peter rolls his eyes.

"Yeah, you know me. I'm all about the party scene."

"You could be, now. I wasn't as a kid. Not until I'd graduated."

"Well I'm not you."

It's one of the things Tony appreciates most about the kid, that he knows himself, doesn't second-guess the rightness of it. Still though, it isn't helping Tony deflect the conversation the way he'd like to. "You don't have any Avenging to do?"

Peter shakes his head. "Not anymore."

"What do you mean, 'not anymore'?"

"You know."

Tony stops, spreads his arms out to gesture around the cabin, as if to remind them both where they are.  "I really don't."

"Oh. Just, everything is pretty quiet now." He looks a little bummed about it.

"That's good, isn't it?"

"Quiet isn't always a good thing."

"That's just because you're a city kid, you're not used to the quiet. Spend some time out here, you get used to it."

"Getting used to something doesn't make it good."

Tony turns back to the ATV he's been messing around with. Mostly just routine maintenance, making sure she'll run okay once the thaw has really come. It's not developing nanotech, or learning how to jerry-rig alien tech on the fly. Tony shuts his eyes for a moment, pushing the memory away, thankful that Peter can't see his face from this angle.

He opens his eyes. The ATV. It's simple and boring and necessary work. No one's life hangs in the balance, if he does something stupid.

"You told me once that you wanted me to learn from all of your mistakes without having to make them myself," Peter says.

Tony sighs. "Yeah?"

"So," Peter pauses, seeming to struggle for the words. "I know you had trouble, after New York. No one talks about it. But I know you, you don't go from mark eight to mark forty-two in a couple months if you're not freaking out."

"Is that why you're here? Re-entry problems, after... " He won't say it.  Tony turns around to look at Peter, catches him shaking his head.

"No, it's not like that."

"Then what?"

"I need you to explain to me how it happened. How I - how we all came back."

Tony regrets asking. "You know what happened."

Most of it hadn't made the news - had been undone so precisely that most of the population was blissfully unaware. There's some percentage of people that can remember feeling faint, or dizzy; a momentary disorientation. But to their view, it had passed. They'd gone about their day. The world spun on.

They hadn't felt it the way Peter must have.

Tony rubs at his wrist, the feeling of here and now pulling him out of the memory. The point is, Peter remembers more than most about what happened, at least of those that had vanished.

And after it was all done -  the world returned back to its natural order, the remaining team had spent three agonizing days debriefing.

"You and Nebula, you fixed the ship," Peter prompts.

"Yes."

"And then?"

"And we flew home."

"How?"

Tony rakes a hand over his face. "Christ, kid. We flew home _on the ship_. Do we really have to go through this point by point?"

 

*

 

The ship banks hard left, Nebula's arm straining to hold them steady. Tony activates his suit - what's left of it - sends the bulk of the nanoparticles down his arm as he leans over and grabs on to help.

"How's it going back there?" He yells through the headset.

It takes a while for her to reply, each second feeling interminable. There's a crash from somewhere behind him.

"Not well," she replies. "It's going to take me too long to cut through the compromised parts, and the damage has jammed open the accelerator on the left engine to full throttle. It cuts in and out, and it's too unpredictable for me to compensate with the right forward and rearward engines. The ship is getting torn apart by the strain."

"We could just blow it up."

"The ship? Are you insane?"

"No. Maybe a little. I don't mean the whole ship, I'm talking about a targeted blast."

"We won't be able to control the collateral damage."

"If the ship falls apart we're dead anyway, right? It's worth a shot."

But Nebula seems to have already come to the same conclusion. "I can rig an overload in several of the plasma guns, but I'm going to need both hands."

Tony grabs the wheel in front of him and slaps the switch that'll grant his station control of the ship.

"Go, I've got this," he says to her disembodied arm, feeling more than a little bit nuts.

 

*

 

"Timing multiple overloads like that to happen simultaneously is pretty much impossible, isn't it?" Peter asks.

Most of the time, Tony relishes Peter's quick mind. He likes watching the gears turn, Peter's expression shifting from concentration to wonder and back again as he follows along the logical conclusions to a new idea.

He likes it best when Peter comes up with an answer he himself hadn't predicted, or a logical chain he hadn't thought to fully explore. He'd enjoyed having Peter in the lab with him, practically vibrating with barely contained enthusiasm, asking questions and poking at things he probably shouldn't.

Right now though, not so much.

"I like to think the impossible just means other people haven't been smart enough to figure it out yet," Tony replies. "But yeah, it's not easy. Especially not when you're on a busted-up ship hurtling through space like a goddamn pinball. Nebula is good, but I'm pretty no one the galaxy is _that_ good."

 

*

 

The three successive explosions rock through the ship, deafening Tony.

He may have actually blacked out for a second. When he opens his eyes, there's a dizzying display of flashing lights and warnings in front of him. As his hearing comes back, there's a roaring noise - at first he thinks it's blood rushing in his ears, but the gust of air around him gives it away.

Hull breach.

He'd sort of expected this, though. As carefully as Nebula had managed to target the blasts, there was no way they'd get lucky enough to rip off the malfunctioning engine without getting a single nick in the hull of the ship.

Nebula had already activated some kind of space suit shield thing before she went back, he's pretty sure. In any case, Tony isn't currently in any position to help her. He doesn't have enough active nanoparticles left for a full suit. But he doesn't need armor, not right now.

He overrides their programming on the fly, spreading the bots thin; a gossamer shroud. Just enough to protect him from the vacuum of space.

He blinks, the view in front of him flashing between black-red chaos and blinding white.

_It's cold out here._

 

*

 

Peter isn't looking at him. The wheels are turning again. "That would steady the ship, with the left engine gone," he says.

"Yes and no. We had air pressure escaping the hull breach."

"But it would be a weaker force, and probably a lot steadier than having an engine cutting in and out like it was."

"Yeah."

"The bigger problem would be life support. What's left of your suit - it's not enough to keep you alive in space indefinitely. You'd run out of air, you'd get cold. Probably go unconscious, or close to it, after a minute."

"What, are you looking for a gold star?  If you're here for a pat on the head you came to the wrong place. Go ask Cap for that sort of thing."

He feels like an asshole almost immediately. Peter looks oddly fragile, hands wrapped around another mug of that godawful hot chocolate, the pads of his fingers tracing the design on the mug over and over. It's an SI mug; Tony isn't entirely sure how it got up here. He hadn't brought anything with him when he'd left.

"I'm just trying to help you remember," Peter says.

"Why?"

"Because it's important."

Tony stands, opens the stove to feed another piece of kindling into the fire. The problem with modifying his current woodstove to a second burn model is that he can't work on it while it's in use, he thinks. The other option is to build something from scratch. With Peter here to do the heavy lifting, he could probably throw together a rocket mass heater in a day, maybe less.

"Hey, how long were you planning on sticking around?"

Peter purses his lips, looks askance. "As long as you'll let me?"

It's not an answer. To suggest that Peter is here with Tony's permission is disingenuous at best. If Tony'd had his way Peter never would have set foot out here. He would've stayed in Queens with his friends and his Aunt and his team.

"So what did you do," Peter continues, "about the life support?"

Tony's mind skirts around the memory; like handling hot coals. He remembers blinking hard, over and over again, trying to get his eyes to focus. He remembers hesitating, his hand hovering over the control to shut the rearward compartments.

 

*

 

He tries to raise Nebula over comms, but she isn't answering. Or if she is, it's faint enough that Tony can't hear. There's a ringing in his ears, and his head is pounding - he's not sure if maybe he took a knock to the head or if it's just another symptom of hypoxia.

His hands are tingling, clumsy; slightly blurred in front of him by the shroud of nanoparticles. He slaps at the control to seal off the rearward compartments.

If Nebula is still alive back there, she's on her own for the moment.

"Alright. Talk to me, talk to me," he repeats to himself, eyes scanning over the flashing displays.

With the forward compartments sealed off from the hull breach, the air compressors and CO2 scrubbers are running full-bore to catch up. It's still bone-chilling cold in the cockpit, of course, but at least he won't suffocate. Not yet, anyway. He manages to shut off a few of the other blinking alarms as well, enough to see the mapped out jump plan on the display underneath.

They're two jumps from home.

 

*

 

"Okay, so the hull breach is sealed. What about heat?"

"I rerouted the HVAC system, funneling runoff heat from the remaining engines to only supply the forward compartment. It wasn't ideal, but it was something."

"So you’d be cold, but not freezing."

“Pretty much. I bought myself maybe a few extra minutes to enjoy the view. Turns out slow onset hypothermia is kind of a bitch.”

Peter huffs, his jaw working like he’s clenching his teeth against what he wants to say. “Obviously that’s not it. You don’t just sit there and let yourself die.”

“No, I - ”

Tony struggles to think. His head is killing him, like his own mind is trying to warn him away from the memory. It feels like wading through waist-deep water, like trying drag his body upright in a dead suit.

But Peter is standing there in front of him, his absolute faith in his childhood hero still remarkably unshaken. Tony closes his eyes and tries to remember.

 

*

 

Power levels in the ship are dropping precipitously. At least, as far as Tony can interpret from flashing lights and the graph on the right-hand side of the HUD.

He banks, reeling the ship around towards the next access point. Every second seems to take an eternity. Tony can’t tell if it’s because he keeps blacking out or if the ship really is just moving that slowly. For some reason, Howard Hughes pops into his head. Designing faster and faster planes, frustrated by the way relative motion translated on film without something stationary in the viewport for comparison.

Tony blinks. They’re almost at the access point.

He doesn’t know why he keeps getting distracted like that. Can’t tell how long he’s been drifting, his hands still clutching the controls.

A voice comes over the comms, static-muddled but definitely there. “To… r….ou there?”

“Nebula, is that you?”

He would slap himself, if he still possessed the coordination and energy for it. Who the fuck else would it be out here?

“- outside. Can’t - ” another long pause, “ - have to pilot us through.”

“I know, I’m heading for the next access point now. Just hang on,” Tony replies, no way of knowing how much of what he says is making it through the static.

They make it to the access point just as the power levels drop to zero.

 

*

 

“You ever going to tell me why you’re here?”

Peter cocks his head. “Do you actually want to know?”

“No, I keep asking just because it’s so much fun.”

Peter pushes away from the counter where he’d been leaning, sets his mug down behind him. He steps right up into Tony’s space, his hands coming up to grip Tony’s shoulders tightly.

“I’m here because you need me to be here.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Peter grins down at him; a little fond, a little sad. 

“You’re supposed to be a pretty smart guy, you’ll figure it out.”

 

*

 

The heads-up display flickers and dies. Tony’s heart is hammering in his chest, blood rushing in his ears, the seat harness digging into his shoulders. There’s nothing in front of him now but the stars, the view twisting lazily as the ship drifts through space. There are worse places to die.

“It’s not a bad view, I guess,” he says to himself.

His comm crackles to life, Nebula’s voice coming through remarkably clear.

“You’re alive?” She sounds strained, and a little astonished at his continued well-being.

“I’m surprisingly hard to kill, it turns out.”

Nebula has already moved on. “I’m running diagnostics now. There must have been a hairline crack in the fuel tank.”

 _Running diagn_ \- oh. Right. She’s half machine already, she doesn’t need the ship’s power to run diagnostics when she’s got her own built-in.

He might have zoned out for a bit there, because when he tunes back in he realizes Nebula is still talking.

“ - twenty-three clicks from the final access point, and we’re drifting off course. We need a plan.”

“Well, I’m open to suggestions,” Tony replies.

"I can patch myself into the power system. It would only be a few moments of power, but it could be enough to get us back on course."

"Something tells me there's a downside to that plan."

"I've done it once before, it is not particularly pleasant. It may kill me. Also, it would need to be done from the control room, which means - "

"- which means depressurizing the cabin again so you can get up here, which will probably kill me."

 

*

 

Peter hasn’t moved, still standing directly in front of Tony’s chair.

Tony clenches one hand, feels his wrist twinge in response. He wants to reach out, to settle his hands on Peter’s sides, press his face into Peter’s chest. Feel the steady thrum of the kid’s heartbeat, the rise and fall of of each breath. He shouldn’t.

“How’s your Aunt?” he blurts out instead.

“Pretty torn up. She doesn’t deal well with not knowing where I am.”

“You didn’t tell her you were coming out here?”

“I didn’t have time. It was only supposed to be a field trip, I wasn’t even going to be home late from school.”

“What - ”

“You have to make it back, Tony. You have to make sure she’s okay. _Please_.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes you do. You said you made that first suit - that first arc reactor, to save your own ass. You think of it as being selfish, but it wasn’t.”

Tony can remember building the first reactor. The way he’d become almost manic with single-minded purpose, drawing up the plans, cataloguing the resources available. The way Yinsen’s eyes had widened in understanding when he realized what Tony was trying to do.

"Without that first reactor, you never become Iron Man,” Peter says. “Obadiah Stane takes over your company, Stark Industries gets even more insanely rich selling arms to both sides of the war in Afghanistan, at least until AIM shows up on the market with their army of supersoldiers. Loki opens a portal over the Oscorp building instead of Stark Tower. SHIELD ends up nuking Manhattan."

"You're conveniently leaving out the time I created a genocidal AI and ended up having to vaporize a city in mid-air to stop him."

"And you're conveniently missing the point. You had to make it out of that cave first, before you could do any of that other stuff; the good or the bad. If you give up now, you don't get that chance. And neither do I."

Tony remembers watching the first reactor flicker to life in his hand, the shiver of excitement that had run through him in that moment of success. It's not a feeling he gets often, not anymore.

 _It could run your heart for fifty years_ , Yinsen had said.  

“Or something big for fifteen minutes,” Tony replies.

 

*

 

"I've got a better idea," Tony says over the comms.

"What are you going to do?"

"Something I'm pretty good at, it turns out - saving my own ass. Talk me through finding the power relays."

Nebula doesn't ask for an explanation, which he appreciates. She has a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the ship's inner workings, interspersed with a lot of derogatory comments directed at someone Tony guesses is the ship's primary mechanic. 

She guides him through programming in an automatic flight path to kick in as soon as power is fully restored, since neither of them is going to be capable of piloting the ship once they begin.

Hooking the ship up to the chestpiece is a little tricky, but by some flight of luck he manages not to electrocute himself in the process.

"You might want to buckle up back there," he says, hand poised over the final switch.

"I hope this works, human."

He wonders briefly at being downgraded from first-name basis to general species, but doesn't have time to really care. Every moment they drift is another degree colder, and it's already far too cold in the cockpit.

He flips the switch and the world around him goes blinding white.

 

*

 

"It's so quiet now," Peter says.

It had snowed again last night - softening the hard edges of the world outside, dispersing the moonlight in every direction until the night is only half as dark as it should be. The cottage is plenty warm now, although thanks to Peter's hot cocoa obsession they'd run out of chocolate yesterday evening. But there's still plenty of coffee left. Tony fills up a pot of water to heat on the stove.

"That's good, isn't it?" Tony asks.

"Quiet isn't always a good thing. Anyway, hooking up the chest piece to power the ship for that last jump - did it work?"

 

*

 

Pure white gives way to searing red as he fights to drag his eyes open.

Through the haze, he can just glimpse the Earth spread out below them - glittering blue and vibrant green, almost unreal. Tony is dizzied by the sight of it, brain scrambled by the shuddering of the ship's frame, the inside temp running both searing hot and bone-chilling cold at the same time.

The ship crashes through the atmosphere, screeching in protest as they plummet towards the surface.

"Holy crap, it worked," he says to no one in particular.

 

*

 

Tony doesn't remember splashing down.

He does remember a floating sensation, interrupted only by the constant stab of pain in his gut. He loses Nebula in the chaos that follows - SHIELD must have dispatched ships the moment they'd appeared in the atmosphere. He does remember that it's Rhodey who pulls him out of the water.

Days fall past in a blur of morphine drips and an oxygen mask that someone keeps sticking back on his face, no matter how many times he pulls it off, convinced that he's suffocating.

Someone has to keep reminding him that Peter isn't here. They ask him who Peter is, what happened to him. He doesn't answer.

When he finally wakes up for real, he's propped up in a hospital bed, blinking down at the IV stuck in his arm.

"You gave us a hell of a scare," Rhodey tells him.

"Gave myself a hell of a scare too. Nebula?"

"She's okay. Ross' guys tried to have her transferred to the Raft, but I may have pulled a few strings so she's staying with a few old friends for the moment, somewhere off the radar."

Tony can guess he means Steve, Nat, and Sam.

"Who'd we lose?"

"Tony - "

"Don't jerk me around. How many?"

Too many, is the answer he gets. He stays awake as long as he can, the roster of names and faces flashing in front of him, entire life stories boiled down to one or two word summaries.

 

Pepper Potts: _Confirmed alive._

 

Vision: _Confirmed deceased._

 

Wanda Maximoff: _Missing_.

 

...

 

Peter Parker: _Status unknown._

 

*

 

It's like whiplash, opening his eyes to see Peter grinning down at him. "You made it."

"Thanks to you."

"Thanks to yourself. Don't try to go all modest on me now, Mr. Stark, it'll just freak me out."

Tony reaches out, lays a hand against Peter's chest. Feels the steady heartbeat against his palm.

"I didn't want to leave you behind,” he says.

Peter shrugs. "Neither did I."

"You gonna stick around?"

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"You know why."

The snow has finally melted outside, the ground thawed enough that fresh green grass has started poking its way up out of the mud. It's warm out - warm enough that they’ve let the fire burn down to ash and then go out.

Peter crouches in front of the stove, sweeps out the ashes and sets up fresh kindling inside, but doesn't light it. 

“I’m gonna miss this place,” Tony admits. Even as the words leave his mouth, he’s not sure why he says it.

"We'll come back someday, once this is all over for real. In the meantime though, you’ve got a ton of work to do.”

Tony pulls away, leaning back in his chair. He looks outside, blinks hard enough that the ember red of the dying fire flashes in front of his eyes, then fades to sterile hospital white.

“What if I can’t fix this?”

“You will, because that’s the only way you get to have this again,” Peter gestures around the cabin. Tony can’t help but clock the way the gesture includes Peter too. “If that’s what you want.”

"When did you get so wise, kid?"

"I haven't, yet. But I will someday. So get to work.”

 

 


	2. Anagnorisis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note: This isn't a direct continuation of the first chapter. It's basically what happens when Tony tries to recreate his memories of 'Alaska', once he's done undoing the snap.

* * *

 

“Mr. Stark, you really didn’t have to do this.” Peter’s got his hands clasped in his lap, one leg bouncing nervously against the passenger-side door. “It’s just high school, it’s not that big a deal.”

“And I say otherwise.”

The kid is right though. Graduation was just an excuse, an arbitrary line of demarcation Tony had picked late one night, exhausted and not a little bit drunk and still reeling with relief that _it had worked, it had actually fucking worked_.

And if Peter just so happened to be graduating half a semester early so he could intern full-time at SI for a few months before starting at MIT, well then, that just worked out all the better.

Tony eases the car around a curve in the road. They’d set out mid-morning, Peter stopping just long enough to kiss May goodbye before skidding out the door with his duffle slung over one shoulder, excited for the trip.

Three hours of driving hasn’t seemed to calm that energy in the least. They still have about an hour and a half to go, but Tony spies a promising looking diner up ahead.

“You hungry? We could stop for lunch,” he says, nodding towards the signage.

“Yeah, sure.”

The diner is everything Tony expected from the outside - the plastic laminated menu, the din of families talking and eating, kids yelling and coloring on the brown paper table-covers, the smell of fried food and coffee refills leftover from the morning rush still permeating the air.

Peter looks around, but his gaze keeps landing on Tony and then flicking away again.

“What?”

“Sorry. Just - it’s not the kind of place I ever pictured you eating at.”

Tony rolls his eyes. He knows he hasn’t actually spent that much time with the kid, not since he’d come back. It wasn’t out of a lack of desire on Tony’s part. Things had been rough for a while, after. Peter, for his part, had seemed to take it in stride, all too well accustomed by now to being kept at arm's length.

He guesses he only has himself to blame, then, if the kid still sometimes thinks of Tony as some kind of platonic ideal; not fully human.  The hero worship had actually been worse for a while, when he’d first come back. When Peter looks at him, it’s painfully obvious all he sees is the hero. The man who saved half the universe.

When Tony looks at Peter, all he can see is the kid fading away in his arms.

He hadn’t saved anyone. He’d righted a wrong. That was all.

Tony pastes on a grin for the kid. “Pretty sure I can eat anywhere I want.”

“Well, _duh_.”

The food is good - filling and fattening, a perfect counterbalance to the cold outside. Tony polishes off a hamburger and fries, and Peter digs into his buffalo chicken mac-and-cheese with enthusiasm.

The waitress does an impressive job of covering her surprise at having Tony Stark in her mom-and-pop diner, but when they’ve finished their meal she brings out slices of raspberry chocolate cheesecake for the both of them with a quiet, “On the house, Mr. Stark.”

He appreciates the gesture, but doesn’t want the dessert coming out of anyone’s paycheck, making a mental note to throw another twenty into the tip before they leave.

Peter devours his slice in three bites, making the kind of happy noises Tony would normally associate with something else entirely. Then he starts not-so covertly eyeing Tony’s slice.

Without a word, Tony pushes the plate to the center of the table, so they can both finish off the second slice at a (slightly) more controlled pace. Peter looks a bit surprised by the gesture, but digs in.

“You do hot chocolate here?” Tony asks, the next time the waitress stops by the table to top off their water.

“It’s just the packet kind,” she hedges.

“That’s fine. We’ll take two to go, please.”

She leaves, and Peter looks at him, bemused.

“You like hot chocolate?”

“Sometimes,” he says. “Your body burns more calories in the cold. It’ll keep us warm for the drive.”

“O-okay.”

Peter’s doubtfulness isn’t entirely misplaced. They both know the temperature control system in the Audi works perfectly well, not to mention the heated seats. Whatever. The hot chocolate arrives along with the check, both drinks topped with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles.

Tony nearly snaps the pen in two when he notices the way Peter’s tongue darts out to scoop up some of the topping.

That’s not what this trip is about, he reminds himself.

The rest of the drive goes by mostly in silence. A light blanket of snow dusts the branches of the trees and either side of the road, growing thicker as as they begin to climb into the Adirondacks. Peter, who’s sum total of travel experiences thus far consists entirely of Montauk beach; Berlin; and _Space_ ; has his eyes glued to the window the whole time, awestruck by the mountain views unfolding around every turn.

The cabin is exactly as he’d pictured it. Close enough to Whiteface Mountain to hit the slopes, but far enough away from the resort and the town that it still feels secluded.

“Woah,” is all Peter says, standing in the driveway with his duffel bag in one hand.

It’s a little bigger than what Tony had wanted, but not enormous. A few bedrooms, a wrap-around porch. Huge windows looking out over the view from the living room, and a rough-hewn stone fireplace smack in the middle.

It’ll do.

Peter looks around inside. “Uh, do you know which rooms are ours?”

“The whole place is ours, kid. Pick whichever one you want.”

Peter drops his bag and heads off to explore, while Tony heads over to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water, glad to see the fridge and pantry have both been stocked with the basics. He can hear Peter’s footsteps as he makes his way around upstairs, then a muffled exclamation and the sound of a door sliding open and closed again.

Tony nearly chokes on his water when he sees Peter swing by outside, from the second floor down to the back porch.

“Mr. Stark, there’s a hot tub out here!”

Peter’s already got the cover peeled up from one side, frowning down at the controls by the time Tony makes it out back.

“It’s empty though, maybe it’s just for summer?” Peter says.

“Nah, they just empty it out so it doesn’t freeze when it’s not in use.”

Tony flicks a few of the controls, and is rewarded with a soft hum as the tub’s heater clicks on and the pipes begin to work.

“Nice,” Peter says. “Hey, is it okay if I take the bedroom on the far side, the one facing downhill?”

Tony has to do a bit of quick spatial reasoning before he can work out which one he means - he’s seen pictures of the place but hasn’t actually seen the bedrooms in person yet. It clicks into place soon enough though, because of course Peter wants the room with the vaulted ceiling.

“Absolutely.”

Peter looks up at him. “We have this place for the whole weekend?”

Tony opens his mouth to agree but stops himself. That had been the plan, to give the kid a little weekend getaway before he dove headfirst into his internship. But standing here now - the cold mountain air sweeping around them, filling Tony’s lungs and turning Peter’s cheeks pink, his expression so open and excited and completely at ease…

“We have it for as long as you want,” Tony says instead. He can work it out with the owners, he’s sure. Buy them out, if need be. “You deserve it.”

Peter swallows, looks away.

“You say stuff like that a lot, Mr. Stark, but I didn’t - I didn’t really do anything. You and Mr. Rogers and everyone else, you guys were the ones that saved everyone. I wasn’t even there.”

That last part comes out like a confession, like Peter is ashamed of his absence from the fight.

Tony wants to object, but can’t manage to find the right words. What he wants to say is, _you were there when it mattered, even if you don’t remember it. Even if you weren’t really there at all, and even if I know that now - it doesn’t matter. You were there, and I needed you so much._

But he knows if he says any part of that, he’d have to explain the rest. He’d have to admit to Peter just how close he’d come to giving up. How he almost hadn’t made it back to Earth at all, nevermind made it through the following weeks and months before they’d finally found a way to undo the catastrophe.

Instead he clears his throat, changes the subject.

“Hot tub’ll take a while to fill up and get up to temperature. Why don’t you go unpack, get settled in.”

He can tell Peter wants to say more, but purses his lips and turns back towards the house. Peter takes the normal way back up to his room - in through the door and up the stairs, rather than swinging around. Tony tells himself he isn’t disappointed in the rapid aboutface in mood. They were supposed to be here celebrating, for chrissake.

They make a quick salad and grill up steaks for dinner, eating side by side at the kitchen island, because the dining table felt too big, too formal for just the two of them.

“You up for skiing tomorrow?”

“Yeah! I’ve never been skiing before.”

“What, really? I had no idea.” Tony feigns surprise, notes the way Peter’s fist curls around his napkin in response, like he’s considering throwing it at him. He doesn’t.

By the time they’ve cleared away the plates, steam is rising up from the hot tub outside. Peter keeps looking over at it, clearly jonesing to try it out.

“Go on, I’m going to make myself a drink first.”

Peter grabs several large towels from one of the bathrooms, setting them down on the side of the tub before kicking out of his shoes and stripping down to his boxers. He slips into the water immediately, an expression of wonder coming over his face.  Tony turns back to his drink, tells himself he wasn’t watching.

He grabs a jacket for himself and a bathrobe for Peter, before heading outside to sit in one of the loungers.

Peter watches him sip his drink.

“You’re not coming in?”

“Eh, maybe tomorrow.”

The sun has mostly disappeared over the horizon, the porch lights coming on automatically around them, bathing everything in soft, warm light. There’s a gas fire pit nearby as well, which Tony lights for a little more heat.

Peter turns away, leaning back against the side of the tub with his eyes closed, wet curls of hair falling over his forehead. Tony watches the way the light plays over the lines of Peter’s throat as he swallows.

“Why here?” Peter asks, cracking his eyes open to look Tony’s way.

“Hmm?”

“Not that I mind, it’s perfect out here, it just - it seems kinda random.”

“No real reason,” he lies. “Thought you’d like it.” That part is the truth, at least.

“I do. Thanks Mr. Stark, really.”

“You’re welcome. Really.”

Peter rolls his eyes at being made fun of, but he’s smiling.

The kid is right. It’s beautiful out here.

 

*

 

The next morning Tony takes one look at the kid’s outfit and shakes his head.

“You’re gonna freeze your ass off in that.”

Peter looks down at his jeans and hoodie, shrugging. “It’s what I brought with me.”

“At least put your suit on underneath, so you can use the heater.”

“Oh, good idea!”

Peter races back upstairs and is changed in a flash.

They have to rent equipment for Peter, but they’re there early enough that the lines aren’t too long. The upside to fully-kitted out ski gear is that no one recognizes Tony on sight alone, although the guy at the lift-ticket counter does a double-take when he hands Tony his credit card back.

Tony brings his fingers to his lips and raises his eyebrows. It takes a moment before the guy nods back in response.

They head towards the base of the hill, Peter walking a bit clumsily in the boots but carrying his skis and poles easily enough, of course.

“Are people going to wonder what you’re doing here with some random kid?” he asks.

“Probably.”

“And?”

“I’m not worried about it.”

Tony is well aware that there’s a pretty persistent rumor going around that Peter is actually his kid. He knows it’s an easy enough logical jump - there are just enough similarities between them to make it plausible. That, plus the internship.

He hasn’t done anything yet to quash the rumors; it’s a decent enough cover story, and if it keeps people from figuring out Peter’s true identity, then Tony’s fine with it.

Mostly.

Some moments significantly less so than others.

They start on the bunny hill, despite a torrent of indignant objections from Peter. Tony shows him how to move without getting his skis stuck on one another, how to turn, how to stop. It’s a little awkward as Peter gets used to treating the skis as extensions of his body, but once he’s got the hang of it he’s pretty much unstoppable.

They spend the day on the hill, stopping only for a quick lunch at the lodge. Peter trades in his skis for a snowboard afterwards, wanting to try out both. They head to the far side of the mountain for the afternoon, where Peter sees other kids messing around on the jumps.

Which of course means he wants to try them too.

Tony ends up sticking his poles and skis into the snow, standing off on the side of the half-pipe while Peter watches and then imitates the other snowboarders. He wipes out a bunch of times, but always bounces back up to try again.

“Hey, Pete,” Tony yells, waving him over after a particularly messy crash landing.

“Yeah? Oh, sorry. You don’t have to stay and watch, Mr. Stark, if you want to keep skiing,” Peter says breathlessly.

“Don’t worry about it. Just, be a little more careful out there, okay?”

Peter looks at him incredulously. “Huh? It’s not like I’m gonna get hurt. And even if I do - ”

“Even if you do, people might ask questions if they see you walking off a broken leg.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Plus, I’d rather you not break your leg - or anything else - in the first place.”

Peter tones it down a bit after that, but not by much. After the half-pipe, they find a mostly-empty blue trail that Peter likes on the very edge of the resort. It’s just steep enough to not be boring, but meanders around enough that it seems almost twice as long as the other trails. Peter stands on his snowboard and heads straight down, his arms thrown out on either side of him.

When they make it to the bottom he’s grinning.

“It’s like flying, almost. Isn’t it?”

“Pretty close,” Tony agrees.

They take the same trail down three more times, returning to it regularly throughout the rest of the day.

By mid-afternoon, Tony’s legs are aching and his lips are growing chapped from the cold.

“You keep going if you want, I’m gonna go grab a drink down at the lodge,” he tells Peter.

“Nah, I’ll come with you. Besides, we can come back tomorrow, right?”

Tony’s body protests at the idea, but if Peter wants to come back then that’s what they’ll do. This is supposed to be his trip, after all.

“As many times as you want,” Tony says.

They pack up their gear and head back to the cabin, stopping for takeout along the way.

Tony changes into sweatpants and a t-shirt as soon as they get back, collapsing onto the couch with a heavy sigh.

Peter is sitting nearby, cross-legged on the floor in front of the coffee table, where he’s setting out the boxes of Chinese food.

“Ned’s family goes skiing sometimes - he talks about it being really fun, except he usually has to spend like half the day on the easy hills watching his little sister so his parents can go off on their own. But I think he even likes doing that, really. Anyway - ”

Peter prattles on for a while, and Tony lets the sound of it wash over him.

They polish off about half the food between the two of them. Tony groans a bit as he bends forward to start closing up the boxes to save for later. He’s not as young as he used to be, and keeping up with Peter all day has taken its toll.

Peter, oddly enough, perks up at the sound. The reason becomes clear a second later.

“Hot tub?” he suggests.

“Now there’s a good idea.”

Peter gathers up the takeout containers and shoves them in the fridge for later.

“Hey kid,” Tony says from the couch. “You know how to make a hot toddy?”

“Uhh, no.”

“Heat up some water first, okay?”

He talks Peter through making a passable hot toddy, which unexpectedly becomes a double when Peter takes one sip of his own and his nose wrinkles up in distaste.

They grab towels and bathrobes and head out back.

The cold actually feels almost good on his sore muscles and joints, but the heat of the water feels infinitely better. Tony sinks down into the water with a groan, stretching his legs out to rest on the seat opposite, pretending not to notice the way Peter's eyes track every movement.

Peter is seated diagonally across from him, his arms stretched out over the lip of the tub. He copies Tony, sinking down into the water slightly so that his legs can reach the opposite side. Tony drops one hand down into the water to rest on Peter’s ankle, his thumb stroking over the joint.

“Good day?” Tony asks. He already knows, but he needs to hear it anyway.

“Good day. Pretty much the best day.”

Tony closes his eyes. “Hmm. Pretty much? We’ll have to try harder tomorrow.”

Peter laughs. “You’re nuts.”

“So people have said.”

They stay in the water until long after the sun has set. Peter sits with his neck craned back against the lip of the tub, staring up at the stars.

“They look different, you know?”

“Not as much light pollution out here,” Tony replies.

“No, not that. I mean yeah, they’re a lot clearer out here, but that’s not what I meant. I think it changes how you look at them, knowing you’ve been out there, you know?”

And just like that, Tony can’t breathe. He squeezes his hand around Peter’s ankle, anchoring himself to it. Reminds himself that Peter is right there, solid, unwavering.

“Mr. Stark?” Peter asks. He’s tipped his head back down, expression tinged with concern.

“It’s fine. Sorry, I just -  ”

Tony has to peel his fingers away from Peter’s skin one at a time, wrapping his hand around his opposite wrist as a poor substitute.

“I’m sorry,” Peter is quick to apologize. “I shouldn’t have said anything. We don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t - ”

“Pete, I said it’s fine.”

They sit in silence for a while. As soon as his hands are steady enough, Tony lifts his drink from the side of the tub, swallows the rest of it down.

They climb out not long after that, shivering as soon as the air hits their skin, both of them fumbling to get wrapped up in their robes as quickly as possible.

Peter pauses just a few steps inside the doorway, his clothes bundled up in his arms, shifting his weight from one foot to the other to warm up. He glances over at Tony, grinning.

“Hey, next time we should get a fire going in here before we go outside.”

And just like that, the last vestiges of panic finally fade.

Shame settles low in his gut to replace it. The trip is supposed to be about Peter. Tony can’t screw it up like this; the kid deserves better.

 

*

 

Tony sleeps late the next day. He may or may not have taken the whiskey to bed with him, eschewing the pretense of the hot toddies entirely and pouring it into a glass, neat. It may not have been the best decision.

He’s felt worse. He’s also felt much, much better.

He was supposed to take the kid skiing again today.

Tony finds Peter still in his pajamas, crouched down in front of the fireplace, adding kindling to the flames. The sight throws him for a loop. _Don't try to go all modest on me now, Mr. Stark, it'll just freak me out._

“Kid, where’d you learn to build a fire?”

“Youtube.”

“Ah.”

_We'll come back someday, once this is all over for real._

“I made pancakes,” Peter says over his shoulder, waving one arm towards the kitchen.

There is indeed a lopsided pile of pancakes stacked on a plate. Tony grabs one off the top and folds it in two, eating it in two bites.

“Uh, some of them came out a little burned,” Peter says. “You might want to have them with syrup, to cover the taste.”

The kid’s not wrong. Tony sets the coffee maker brewing and pulls out a plate and some silverware, dousing the next two pancakes with ample amounts of syrup before he digs in. Peter seems content to stay sitting on the floor in front of the fire, ignoring his phone which buzzes on the coffee table with what Tony assumes is a flurry of texts. Eventually Peter reaches over and switches it to silent.

Tony frowns. “May worried about you?”

“Nah, just my friends,” Peter brushes it off, a little too casually. “I talked to May a little while ago, told her how cool it was skiing yesterday.”

“Your friends - Greg and RJ?”

Even at this distance, Tony is pretty sure he can see Peter roll his eyes. “Ned and MJ. I know you know their names, Mr. Stark.”

He does. But it’s an easy way to get that look off of Peter’s face.

There’s a reason they haven’t spent much time together since Peter had come back.

Because inevitably Peter will let his mask slip, just a little bit, just enough to remind Tony that there’s no way the kid could’ve felt himself dying piece by piece, millions of lightyears from home, and come out of that experience completely unscathed. Gone back to high school like nothing had happened. Related to his friends the same way he could before.

And Tony will see all of that and panic. And drink.  And remember that Peter deserves a mentor who isn’t such a complete fucking mess.

Tony swallows a lump of pancake, washes it down with some coffee.

“You want to go skiing again today?” he tries.

Peter shakes his head. He’s fidgeting a little, staring down at his hands in his lap.

“Can we just stay here?”

“Of course.”

 

*

 

Peter spends the rest of the morning stretched out on the couch with a book, while Tony takes the chair opposite, scrolling through some of the work he’s been ignoring.

They have lunch late, spreading out the boxes of leftover Chinese out on the coffee table again, eating it cold because neither of them seems to care enough to reheat it.

At around 4pm, it starts to snow.

Tony doesn’t notice right away; he looks up to find the bare branches on the trees outside already covered in a fresh dusting, the cover on the hot tub gradually disappearing under the tiny flakes.

He finds himself glad for the fire. It looks cold out there.

Peter, for his part, has stopped reading entirely, book lying forgotten on the couch. He watches the snow coming down in silence. There’s something off in his expression, a niggling suggestion that twists in Tony’s gut, much as he tries to ignore it. The kid is fine. He’s here, he’s safe. Solid.

Alive.

Tony sets the tablet down and stands to stretch, then nudges Peter’s leg with his knee. Peter startles at the touch, but covers it quickly.

“You want hot chocolate?” Tony asks.

“Sure. Do we have stuff for it here?”

They do. Or at least, there’s milk in the fridge and a selection of chocolate bars from MarieBelle stashed away in Tony’s weekender bag.

“Woah, are those - ?” Peter says when he sees them.

“Yep. Picked them up before we left.”

“You took me there once, like a year ago.”

“I did. You ordered something ridiculous and your aunt yelled at me the next day for sending you home riding the mother of all sugar highs.”

"She did not."

"She probably wanted to though."

Peter doesn’t look abashed in the least. He plucks the bars out of Tony’s hand and holds them up to his face, eyes closed, inhaling the scent.

“Mmmm.”

Tony has to turn away. He busies himself with the stove, filling a small pot with milk and setting it to heat.

“Which one do you want to try? I couldn’t remember what you ordered last time, so I got a variety,” he asks, without turning around.

“I kinda want to try the matcha one. Is that weird?”

“Let’s find out.”

Tony skips the cinnamon this time, not sure about how it would pair with the matcha. He breaks up the pieces of the bar and stirs them into the milk, which turns a light spring green as the chocolate melts into it. It definitely looks a little strange, but it smells amazing.

He only adds about half the bar before lifting the spoon out. “Taste,” he tells Peter.

Peter reaches up to steady Tony’s hand before leaning forward. He does it so quickly, Tony doesn’t have time to look away - watches the way his eyes close just as his lips wrap around the spoon, the bob of his throat as he swallows, tongue darting out to lick his lips clean afterward.

Tony almost drops the spoon.

“Hm,” Peter says, his eyes open now. “It doesn’t really taste like hot chocolate. It’s good though.”

“More?” Tony gestures towards the remaining half of the bar.

“No, I don’t think so? You should try it.”

So he does. Tells himself there isn’t some nebulous line of demarcation that’s being crossed here. It’s perfectly innocent, after all. That doesn’t change the fact that Tony is very glad they’re out here in the cabin, miles away from anyone they know, not at the compound where someone else might walk in and see.

Start asking questions Tony doesn’t have answers to anymore.

_What is he, your ward?_

And Tony can remember just how quick they’d both been to deny it.

“Mr. Stark? Is it that bad?” Peter is asking.

Right. The hot chocolate.

Tony shakes his head. “No, it’s fine. Like you said, different than hot chocolate, but still good.”

They pour out two mugs and drink it right there, both of them leaning against the counter. Peter is quiet - he’s been quiet all day, sure, but up until now it had been a comfortable, lazy kind of quietness. This strikes him as different.

Tony nudges his shoulder. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Peter says, then frowns. “Sorry, it’s stupid. It’s just, my uncle used to make hot chocolate the same way, on the stove, you know? It’s been two years, I thought that by now little random stuff like that would stop reminding me so much.”

“Can I let you in a little secret that you may not like?”

Peter looks at him, perplexed. “I guess?”

“That never really goes away. Every once in a while I’ll pass someone on the street wearing my mom’s perfume, twenty-something years later, and it still stops me cold.”

“How do you deal with it?”

“Let’s see, I think what I’m supposed to say here is that I appreciate them for what they are, little reminders of someone that I loved, an opportunity to remember the good times, favorite moments you had with them, all that crap,” Tony says. “But mostly I don’t deal with it. It’s kind of my thing.”

“Oh.”

There’s a long pause.

“Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“Talk to me about him, pick a favorite memory.”

Peter doesn’t answer right away. He takes a long sip of his drink, then purses his lips, thinking.

“He always put cinnamon in the hot chocolate when he made it. May thought it was weird, but Ben and I both liked it better that way.” Peter’s expression stays blank for a moment, then a small smile manages to break through. “He used to like, chase her around the kitchen with the spice shaker thing, trying to put it in her mug.”

Tony can picture it - Peter clutching his own mug and watching the spectacle unfold, May and Ben play-fighting, hamming it up a little (or a lot), just to keep Peter laughing.

“I bet the cleanup was fun, afterward.”

Peter snorts. “Oh yeah. There’d be like, splotches of hot chocolate on the walls and cinnamon just _everywhere_. May liked to use it as an excuse to make us clean the kitchen.”

“What, you were considered guilty by association?”

“Pretty much. I provided ‘aid and support to the troublemaker,’ so I always had to help with the clean up.”

Tony can picture that too. May standing in the kitchen, arms crossed in mock-disappointment, surveying the damage as Peter and Ben, still snickering, scrub at the walls and wipe down the counters. It’s a sweet scene, a good memory.

Tony resists the urge to change the subject. Recognizes it for the impulse that it is; his own shitty way of coping that he shouldn’t be foisting off on Peter, of all people.

“Talking about it helps,” Peter says, after a moment. “For a while after it happened, we didn’t really talk to each other - me and May, I mean. We both just cried a lot, or sat on the couch together with the TV on, not really watching.”

Tony makes some vague sound of encouragement.

“I had to go to the school counselor, which I hated. It was just one more thing that made me different from the other kids, you know? Being singled out like that. But she made me talk about stuff, and she um - she had May come in once too, referred us to a family psychologist. We only went a couple times, I think that was all the insurance would cover, but it helped a lot, ‘cause we weren’t just keeping it all to ourselves.”

It occurs to Tony that Peter isn’t telling him all this just because he wanted to talk about Ben.

Tony sets his mug down, then picks it up again, needing something to do with his hands. He needs to be the adult here, the mentor figure.

“Have you talked to May, or anyone, about what happened?”

“Yeah, a little. I don’t want to worry May, so I skimmed over a lot of stuff with her. I told Ned basically everything though. He freaked out a lot, so maybe I shouldn’t have, but I really needed to tell somebody.”

Tony had dropped the kid off at home with an vague offer to call if he needed anything, when they’d finally made it back. Then he’d driven away. Spent the next two months listening to the kid’s voicemails - mostly just reports on how patrolling went, but there was always that hint of anxiety there - a moment of hesitation near the end of the call, where Peter must’ve been debating with himself whether or not to say more.

He hadn’t though, and Tony had been too much of a coward to pick up the damn phone and ask how he was doing.

Peter is watching him closely. “Are we ever going to talk about it?” he asks.

It would be all too easy to be glib. Say, _talk about what? Hey, what do you want to do about dinner? It’s getting late._

If it was anyone else asking, that’s exactly what Tony would do.

“Do you need to talk about it?” Tony says.

It’s not really fair, phrasing it as a need rather than a want. But Peter flips it around on him -

“Do you?”

“Maybe.” He pauses. “Probably. I’m not great with the whole therapy thing. Tried it a couple of times, didn’t really work out. But I can listen, if you need to talk.”

Peter bites his lip, and Tony can recognize it’s the same sort of hesitation as the voicemails. He can’t go back and fix that wrong, but he’s here now at least.

“It’s just, there’s stuff that Ned doesn’t really get. He thinks the superhero stuff is cool, and sometimes really scary. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. Like, I tell him about stuff and he thinks it’s scary, but he doesn’t always seem to get that I think it’s scary too? It’s like he thinks I must be wired differently, that everyone who chooses to do the kind of stuff that we do doesn’t feel fear the same way.”

There’s another long pause. Before Tony can figure out what to say, if he should say anything at all, Peter continues.

“He thinks what I did was brave. That I stayed on the ship on purpose instead of by accident, even when I try to explain it to him. That I fought Thanos because it was the right thing to do, and not just because there wasn’t really any other choice. That I - ” Peter stops for a moment, swallows. Takes a breath. “I wasn’t brave, and no one else was there who knows that, except for you.”

Tony reaches out, plucking the mug from Peter’s hands and setting it down, along with his own. He rests his hands on Peter’s shoulders, his thumbs just brushing the kid’s collarbones through the fabric of his t-shirt.

“Kid, listen to me. You were plenty brave out there, don’t ever think you weren’t. Understand?”

Peter is shaking his head, his eyes focused somewhere off to the side.

“C’mon, don’t try to tell me no one’s ever explained to you that bravery isn’t an absence of fear. You’re allowed to be afraid, you’re _supposed_ to be afraid, in that kind of situation. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t.”

“Uncle Ben would’ve wanted me to - ”

Oh christ. It’s true that Tony never had the chance to meet the man, but from everything he knows about Peter’s life he can extrapolate more than enough.

“Uncle Ben would’ve wanted you to stay safe.”

Turns out that’s the exact wrong thing to say. Peter sets his jaw, glaring up at him.

“Uncle Ben died trying to stop a mugging. He would’ve wanted me to do the right thing, no matter what.”

“And you did.”

Tony squeezes Peter’s shoulders for emphasis. He’s not sure what else he can do here, except maybe to give Peter a different frame of reference. He clears his throat, searching for the right words.

“I had trouble. After Afghanistan, after New York. I don’t talk about it much because - well, I just don’t talk about it. I built thirty-something suits in the space of two months after New York happened, you think I wasn’t freaking out?

“I was terrified when I saw the ship land in the middle of 6th Ave. I got on that ship convinced it was a one-way ticket, but I had to do it because I didn’t see any other choice. You think I’m not brave?”

“That’s not the same.”

“Why, because it’s me? It’s exactly the same, Pete.” He pulls Peter into a hug, tipping his head down, his cheek brushing against Peter’s hair. “Kid, you’re like the bravest person I’ve ever met, if you think you’re not brave enough then I guess the rest of us must be the very worst kind of cowards.”

Peter clutches at Tony, his face pressed into Tony’s shoulder. He’s not crying, Tony is fairly certain, just shaky; overwrought. Tony runs his hands up and down Peter’s back, thinks that this is good. This is fine.

This is reassurance, and care, and Tony doing the mentor-ly things he probably should’ve done months ago. He tells himself that the tickle of Peter’s breath against the base of his neck doesn’t make his heart beat just a little faster, that he isn’t just a little too enthralled by the feel of Peter’s muscles gradually relaxing under his hands.

_I’m sorry, I’m confused as to the relationship here._

You and me both, buddy, Tony thinks.

 

*

 

They go out to dinner that night. Nothing fancy, just a nearby pub and grill type place with pool tables up front and ten different kinds of burgers on the menu. They get a booth near the back.  

Tony orders one of the locally brewed beers on tap and Peter gets a soda, and they eat their way through a sampler platter of appetizers.

“Between the Chinese takeout and the burgers, I’m going to get an earful from my dietician when we get back,” Tony says, watching Peter lick the salt and grease from his fingers.

“You have a dietician?” Peter asks.

“Well, I have FRIDAY. She’s not technically credentialed.”

“Oh. I thought you meant like an actual person.”

“A person would be easier to ignore. Or bribe. I can’t buy FRIDAY’s silence with gifts. I’ve tried.”

Peter rolls his eyes, setting his glass down. “So is that what this trip is?”

Whoops. “If you want it to be. Consider it an apology for accidentally dragging you into space and getting you killed.”

“You didn’t ‘get me killed’, Mr. Stark.”

“Agree to disagree on that one. But take your pick, I could be apologizing for that, or for bringing you to Germany in the first place, or more recently for basically abandoning you when you came back, after Titan. This probably isn’t enough to cover all three, but there’s plenty of other things I can do, if you’ll let me.”

“Oh my god, you’re serious. This is like an actual guilt trip.”

“I don’t think that’s quite what that phrase mea- ”

“Apparently for you, it does.”

“It’s not. Okay? I promise you, guilt is only like, fifty percent of the reason I wanted to bring you out here.” Tony remembers sitting in the hot tub yesterday, before his freak out. Peter’s nipples pebbling in the cold air, just above the water line. “Maybe more like twenty-five percent.”

“Are you ever going to tell me the other seventy-five percent of the reason?”

“Do you actually want to know? Or can you just enjoy the trip for what it is?”

Whatever Peter might have said is interrupted by their food arriving. Tony chews and swallows each bite of his burger on autopilot. Peter tips his head back, draining the rest of his soda in a few long swallows.

“It just seems random,” Peter says, eventually. “Why here?”

“Because it was as close as I could get to Alaska without your aunt freaking out on me.”

“Wow, that explains… absolutely nothing.”

Their waiter stops by and drops off a fresh soda for Peter, and another beer for Tony. Tony downs half of it immediately.

“I never told you about what that first trip back from Titan was like, did I?” It’s not really a question, Tony knows damn well he hasn’t.

“No. What does any of this have to do with Alaska?”

“Almost nothing. Except that jumping between the access points can get really bright if you’re in the cockpit, even with your eyes closed, it was just pure white. After each jump, there’d be this split second of stillness, nothing but darkness and the stars. That plus pressure changes from acceleration and deceleration causes changes to the vitreous fluid in the eye, you end up with these little pinpricks of light dancing around, looking just like - ”

“Snow,” Peter finishes for him.

Tony nods.

“We lost cabin pressure at one point, and I didn’t ah - I didn’t realize right away what was happening.”

“You thought you were in Alaska?”

“In a little cabin. With you.” Tony can’t help the flash of Wizard of Oz that pops into his head just then, _and you were there and you were there and you were there_.

“What did, ” Peter hesitates, glancing away and back again, “what did we do there?”

“We drank hot chocolate.”

Peter’s face falls, disappointed.  
  
“Then you told me to get off my ass and go save myself. Not in those exact words,” he clarifies, seeing the way Peter’s eyebrows had shot up. “You were a lot nicer about it, but that was the gist.”

“So… you took me out here to thank me for something I didn’t even do?”

“Kid, you’re the only reason I’m alive right now. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t actually there - I knew I had to make it back, I had to fix it, because I couldn’t stand the thought of letting you down like that again.”

“Mr. Stark, that’s - um. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say to that.”

“You don’t have to say anything. But I don’t want to ever hear you say you didn’t do enough. You did plenty.”

Peter is staring down at the table, fingers tracing over the scratches in the wood. He nods. Tony doesn’t expect that to be the end of it. It’s a lot for Peter to process, a lot to unload on him - Tony feels guilty for that, be also feels like the kid has a right to know. More than that, he _wanted_ to know, to understand. And Tony is realizing with alarming clarity that he’s ready to say anything, do anything, Peter might want.

“Hey, you want dessert?”

Peter shakes his head.

“You want to get out of here?”

“Yeah.”

The drive back to the cabin is silent. Peter kicks off his shoes at the door, wandering into the living room like he’s not sure what to do.

“Alright, spit it out,” Tony says. “Talk to me, what’s bugging you?”

“What’s bugging me?” Peter doesn’t seem to be angry, but he’s definitely upset, and probably overwhelmed.  “You basically just told me you saved the whole world - the whole _universe_ \-  because of me.”

“Half the universe, technically.”

Peter’s face does something complicated, ending in sheer disbelief. It seems to snap him out of whatever spiralling thought pattern he’d been caught in though. Now he’s actually looking at Tony, eyes focused instead of half-wild.

“I saved the world because I’m Iron Man, it’s kind of my thing,” Tony explains. “But yeah, I only survived long enough to do my thing because you told me I wasn’t allowed to give up yet. Which is kind of your thing, isn’t it? Looking out for the little guy?”

“I - I guess.”

“Right. So, we won, yay us.”

“That’s still just, a lot.”

“Yeah, it is. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry to put that on you. Feel free to pretend this conversation never happened, if that makes things easier.”

“No,” Peter says. “I’m glad you told me. A lot of stuff makes sense now that… didn’t, before.”

Tony’s not quite sure what that means, but he figures Peter is still processing, anyway. They can talk about it more later, if they need to.

Tony grabs the small pot off the drying rack, sets it back on the stove and pours in some milk to start heating. It’s a pretty marked difference to what he would’ve called celebrating in the past, but it’s kind of nice in a quiet, domestic sort of way that Tony hadn’t felt comfortable with in years.

After a few minutes he can hear Peter moving around behind him, sweeping out the ashes of the fire from earlier and setting up new kindling in its place. There’s the scrape and catch of a match lighting, and then the soft crackle as the kindling starts to burn.

The hot chocolate is ready. He pours it out into two mugs, adding a quick shot of whiskey to his own because why not.

Peter shuts his eyes when he tastes it. “Mmm.”

“Good?”

“Yeah. It’s really rich.”

“I used the seventy-percent dark Honduran Trinitario this time.”

“And cinnamon.”

“And cinnamon,” Tony confirms. He reaches out to nudge Peter’s side. “C’mon, we’re missing out on some quality hot tub time.”

Peter follows him outside, both of them falling into what’s become a comfortable routine. Towels and robes are stacked at the ready, drinks deposited on the edge of the tub as they strip down.

This time, they both end up on the same side of the tub, looking out over the mountains in the semi-darkness, shoulders brushing. Tony stretches out his arms along the back of the tub, feels a twinge of possessive satisfaction when Peter doesn’t hesitate before leaning back, so his head is resting against Tony’s arm.

“Was there a hot tub at the cabin?” Peter asks quietly.

“No. But there should have been.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I don’t remember all that much. It was small, and the only heat source was this clunky wood stove that you enjoyed disparaging.”

“‘Cause it was cold - I mean, on the ship?”

Tony swallows. “Yeah. The view was incredible though.”

“Even better than here?”

“Way better than here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful up here, but out there it was...” Tony shakes his head, struggling for the right word.

Tony brings his hand up from the side of the tub, lets his fingers sink into Peter’s hair.

“I’ll take you out there, someday, if you want.”

“To imaginary Alaska?”

Brat. He tugs Peter’s hair lightly in retaliation.

“To real Alaska.”

Peter turns to face Tony. The strain from earlier in the day is gone from his expression. Tony knows it’ll be back, the same way he knows that his own calm in talking about the cabin, about the ship, won’t last either.

But for right now, it’s perfect.

“I’d like that,” Peter says.

 

* * *


End file.
